Cleaning up the Big Village

Northwest of the high steel and glass towers of downtown Port Moresby and the ports, lies Hanuabada, the biggest Motuan Village - one of only a few remaining traditional villages built over the water on stilts. Big Village, as it is referred to nowadays, still observes many traditional customs. The village is home to about 18,000 people.

Urbanization is forcing growing communities and villages including Big Village to use existing or ad hoc alternative sanitation practises that are poor, unsafe and over time costly.

Living conditions are consequently degraded and public health and environmental costs associated with blocked or missing drain resources, rubbish washed onto the village from the seas, create public health hazards and damage that extends into other areas including in health and general hygiene.

World Vision recently launched Hanuabada Ranu Bona Mauri Namona Gaukara or Water and Healthy Life Project, the first ever urban Water, Sanitation, and Hygiene project in Papua New Guinea.

The project is expected to benefit about 2,500 households in Hanuabada over a four-year period by improving access to safe drinking water, sanitation facilities, waste collection services, and improving hygiene and waste disposal behaviour.

The project hopes to work towards achieving a coordinated approach with the support of key partners and stakeholders including relevant government agencies for service delivery to meet project outcomes in managing and collection of waste, water, implement the government’s Healthy Island Concept to promote behaviour change and advocacy for sanitation upgrade and improving school sanitation and hygiene facilities.

To officially kick-start the project, a major community clean-up day was organised on 28th of May at Hanuabada-Elevala communities, which saw more than 2,500 villages take time to clean their homes, and in and around the vicinity of their homes.

Household wastes was piled into garbage bags and removed by city authority National Capital District Commission and local construction company Curtain Brothers who provided two 10-tonne trucks for waste removal and an excavator. Piles and piles of rubbish and household waste was removed over three days from in 40 truckloads.